Newsweek's costly mistake

Commentary: Apology raises more questions than it answers

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Newsweek may have committed the most costly mistake in modern journalistic times after publishing and then apologizing for a report that claimed U.S. military personnel desecrated the Quran at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Newsweek may have also set a new standard for journalistic irresponsibility -- and spinning -- since, at first, it stopped short of issuing a retraction.

The blunder looks even more damaging than other recent cases of careless reporting because the shaky report led to fatal riots and put Americans in danger around the world.

In its May 9 issue, Newsweek, relying on anonymous sources, said U.S. military personnel had found that interrogators at the detention installation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, down a toilet.

The explosive story was picked up in publications in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East where it sparked a series of protests and riots. As a result, at least 15 people have been reported dead.

In his Editor's Desk note this week, Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker asked: "Did a report in Newsweek set off a wave of deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan? That's what numerous news accounts suggested last week as angry Afghans took to the streets to protest reports, linked to us, that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Qur'an while interrogating Muslim terror suspects. We were as alarmed as anyone to hear of the violence, which left at least 15 Afghans dead and scores injured. But I think it's important for the public to know exactly what we reported, why, and how subsequent events unfolded."

He then offered chronology of the original report and the reaction to it.

Whitaker added: "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

But you'd be hard pressed to know what it is Newsweek got wrong, and what it is actually apologizing for.

Here's the key part of Whitaker's statement:

"Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur'an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them "not credible." Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts."

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman told the Washington Post that the Newsweek story was "irresponsible" and "demonstrably false." He added that the magazine "hid behind anonymous sources which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage that they have done to this nation or those who were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

But Whitaker pointedly told the New York Times early Monday: "We're not retracting anything. We don't know what the ultimate facts are."

Hours later, he reversed himself and issued a one-sentence statement saying: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay." See related story.

A string of errors

The Newsweek saga follows other shoddy, high profile examples of American journalism and fuels arguments that the American media are out of control.

The Newsweek disaster will no doubt spur commentary about the startling string of errors being made by American journalists.

CBS News' debacle, in which it aired a highly flawed report about President Bush's National Guard duty, was a low mark. That the New York Times and USA Today allowed serial fabricators to publish incorrect story after story was shameful, too.

But for now, this one was as bad as any I've seen.

It seems hard to believe that a magazine as well regarded as Newsweek could be so wrong.

The crisis comes at a time when the magazine is riding high.

A few weeks ago, Newsweek won a magazine association award for its excellent coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign. The magazine was awarded a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2003.

Recently, Newsweek won an Overseas Press Club award for its reporting on abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

So it's all the more stunning to see that its battery of editors could have made such a big mistake and that (apparently) no one on the staff paused to question the validity of the source strenuously before publishing the item.

When newspapers in Afghanistan and Pakistan republished the story, it sparked anti-American demonstrations in the Afghan city of Jalalabad. Four people were killed and more than 60 were hurt. Nearly a dozen more were killed in subsequent days when the protests moved across Afghanistan and spilled out into Pakistan and other countries.

How could a story this explosive have passed through Newsweek's hierarchy without someone raising his or her voice and asking if the sourcing on such a sensitive piece was air tight?

How could Newsweek have allowed such an important a single-sourced story (featuring an anonymous source, no less) to be published?

I would chalk it up to Newsweek wanting very much to have a scoop of any kind. More than most magazines, it prides itself on being as capable of breaking news as the big daily newspapers.

If Newsweek was sure it had such a juicy scoop, why did the magazine bury it in its Periscope section?

Wouldn't you think the editors would want to showcase the magazine's exclusive in the most visible way possible? Even if the story had come in right on deadline, surely the magazine could have done more to highlight the would-be scoop.

Another part of the answer may be that the magazine doesn't always use good judgment.

Earlier this year, Newsweek had to apologize when it ran a photo of Martha Stewart, as she was getting out of jail, which combined a photograph of her face and a photo of a model's body.

Newsworthy

"The fact that a knowledgeable source within the U.S. government was telling us the government itself had knowledge of this was newsworthy," Whitaker was quoted by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

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